Saturday, June 26, 2010

The Multitude Project is proposing an example of an infrastructure that can support massive social movements. It is a LEGO-type infrastructure, which means that it is composed of inter-operable individual services. It is a FREE infrastructure, all services used are available for free on the Internet.

This entire infrastructure can be put together and deployed in only a few hours. Because it is free and easy to build, it is the perfect solution for very dynamic massive actions. It enables massive movements to form spontaneously and act swiftly. Because there is no cost associated with it, this infrastructure can be simply dismantlement after it has served its purpose. For actions of a longer duration, the advantage of this type of infrastructure is that all its development and maintenance is delegated to the service provider.

This example is mostly based on Google free products/services. The beauty of this is that almost all of the infrastructure runes on mobile devices like the iPhone and the Google pone.

Multitude Project built this infrastructure to support an international coalition fighting an ecologically unstable gold mining operation in Rosia Montana, Romania. It is tested for the first time in a real situation, on a massive scale.